


COSMOS

by Left_Handed_Rick



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Cosmic age gap, First Time, Introspective fever dream, Other, Power Dynamics, RaM Mini Bang 2020, Space Tripping, Switch-Rick, auto-erotic asphyxiation, celestial body exhibitionism, co-dependent relationship with space, cosmic entity, ego death, ego-death, explicit descriptions of space, masturbation while high, peak pansexual, substance use, voyerism astronomy, “high” IQ meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:27:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27064123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Left_Handed_Rick/pseuds/Left_Handed_Rick
Summary: Rick Sanchez is the sensory organ of the universe.
Relationships: Rick Sanchez/The Cosmos
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17
Collections: RaM Mini Bang 2020





	1. Cosmic Afterglow

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! Thank you for reading this Mini Bang fic! I'm a big fan of Cosmos, both the television series hosted by [ Carl Sagan's ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT_nzxtgXEw) and [ NDT's. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm4UV5_HsPA) The fandom has already established that Rick will pretty much fuck anything and so after that "Rick fucked a planet" episode, I really wanted to explore this idea of Rick being in a metaphysical relationship with space. 
> 
> This relationship is written as a series of vignettes, and I hope that you enjoy the ride! Thank you so much to my wonderful artist, [ Jojo, ](https://twitter.com/itstruethisnote) and my beta reader, [ Sodium. ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodium_amytal/pseuds/sodium_amytal) Please give them some love!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rick Sanchez is starstuff

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags: Space Porn, Masturbation, Ego-Death, Drugs

_**The Helix Nebula** Image Credit: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit_

Rick Sanchez discovered his sexuality in the bottom of a dirty ashtray.

He climbed the altitude of Mt. Rainier, coaxing his ‘67 Westfalia up a narrow dirt path that wove itself through the Seattle wilderness and high as the mountainous elevation suggested, Rick furrowed his brow as he focused on retaining his motor functioning skills. As he maneuvered the reliable vehicle to "the usual spot", time seemed to slow. The sound on his radio gradually weakened then died out entirely until it was nothing more than an uninterrupted static hiss broken only by the strained mechanical creak of the vehicle as its rickety weight shifted from wheel to wheel. 

Eventually, the westie crept into place, pulling into a park at the edge of a ridge which overlooked a field of wildflowers. In the distance—over Rick’s man-made mess of clutter and debris which had accumulated across the van’s dashboard—the atmospheric silhouette of Mt. Rainier’s snowy peak rose against the backdrop of the setting sun.

Rick cranked the driver’s seat backward, leaning into his mountainside perch as he lit up another spliff and watched the Earth beneath him rotate the stars into view at eight hundred miles-per-second. 

Rick left the radio on, continuing to listen to the background noise of electromagnetic waves. They were traveling at nearly the same speed of the stars which were just beginning to flicker into the encroaching night. The last of the sun’s light dipped beneath the horizon, and the grainy white-noise-residue of Rick’s high lingered like the cosmic leftovers of a spent star. 

He plucked the ashtray from his dashboard and cradled it against his chest as he flicked the ash of his spliff into it. He studied the still-burning clove-and-marijuana embers of his twilight thoughts and for a fleeting moment, it felt as if every secret of the universe was cradled in the fleeting afterglow of the indescribably fragile glass body which Rick held against his heart.

Rick returned his gaze to the contours of the big dipper, imagining the raw materials that spilled from the collapsing shapes of dying stars and into universal life: everything from the smallest grain of sand to the largest celestial body consisted of the same fundamental building blocks. Starstuff. 

The nature of the Cosmos implied a deep interconnectedness to everything within it. From one star to the next, expanding at twelve million miles a minute from a single deterministic point of origin, the boundless four-dimensional continuum of time-space was an existential entity. The non-living organism was a cosmic constellation connected by lingering starstuff. 

The night sky which slowly enveloped Ricks thoughts was the stalwart companion of his existence, and in a sudden sexual awakening, Rick felt the sympathetic vibrations of the cosmos travel through his warming body. He hummed with arousal at the thought, contemplating the vibrant eroticism of a universe in constant motion stirring to life around him. 

It was desire—the act of searching for connection—which was the very antithesis of chaos. Of _his_ chaotic thoughts. Through a half-lidded gaze, Rick reached out and plunged his finger into the smoldering pile of ash, hissing with pain as his erection grew hot with the friction of excited particles beneath his skin. Rick keened into the oscillating cosmic embrace as he drew the burnt tip of his flesh into the wet heat of his mouth. His other hand reached toward the clasp of his jeans, freeing his erection as he leaned further back into the car seat, falling into the universe’s embrace.

Letting the spliff fall onto the cigarette burned carpet of his van, Rick groaned through gritted teeth tossing his head backward into the rush of sensual thoughts. He curled his finger and thumb around the tip of his erection and with his other Rick curled the dirty digit of his index finger into his mouth and bit down hard onto the exposed nerves.

His dick ached and at the mixed messages of pleasure and pain, Rick's eyelids fell to a close. His consciousness fell into the sensation of euphoria and turned inward toward the erotic gaze of his own cosmic thoughts. His lips parted in a silent resonant moan. His expression of ecstasy, no more than a choreographed motion of particles in various quantum states collapsing in real-time as the universe continuously swelled and pulsed around him. Within him. 

Again, Rick tightened his grip over his twitching erection and it throbbed, spilling over with precum as Rick’s breath caught in his chest and charged the particles into the surface of his skin in a shameless heated blush.

Rick Sanchez was the sensory organ of the universe. A vital component of the cosmos which allowed the non-living organism the means to explore and understand itself. Rick's conscious existence within the universe had given it relevance, but his erotic experience of it had imbued it with purpose and meaning. 

Humid breath spilled from his lips in a heady cry condensating against the rapidly cooling glass of his windshield. The pressure climbed into an uncontainable high as Rick desperately sucked the length of his own finger while stroking the length of himself. With a painful groan, Rick’s body folded over itself collapsing into an ecstatic release as the boundless thoughts of his mind expanded outward from his physical body. He huffed deep gaping breaths as he messily came over himself, the dashboard, and his window. 

In hydrostatic equilibrium, the tide of the cosmic ocean simultaneously spilled itself into him, and a sensation of momentary weightlessness washed over him as wanting waves shifted gravity and time and space around him. 

Rick held the still pulsing heartbeat of his fading erection, gasping with the positive nihilism of a newfound purpose. 

The universe was also inside of him. 

He was the cosmic afterglow of starstuff.

_**Mount Rainier National Park** Image Credit: US Department of the Interior_


	2. Astral Projection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rick goes space tripping

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags: Dysphoria, Body Dysphoria, Mindfuck
> 
> Art Credit: A huge shoutout to [ Auntie Jojo ](https://twitter.com/itstruethisnote) for making this amazing art to go with my fic! Please give them some love!

Art Credit: [Auntie Jojo](https://twitter.com/itstruethisnote)

The universe had always existed. In a state or condition that was literally beyond the capabilities of human comprehension, let alone their desire to classify it.

Rick snorted to himself contemplating his own species. Humans who believed themselves ignorant of nothing had never really tried to feel out the boundaries of their own knowledge or existence. Most would never step outside of their carefully constructed comfort zones.

Fucking around with space, however, wasn’t exactly setting a healthy boundary for himself either. The impersonal cosmic entity would always be indifferent to and impartial from his humanistic needs, and the existential fallout was that the routine cosmic shock to his system left Rick feeling more often than not destabilized and disoriented. Detaching from his subjective reality as he flirted with various psychotic breaks.

The current experience was that Rick's physical body had started to feel like an annoying flesh condom that the universe insisted he wear. For safety. Rick had begun hating parts of his physical self. Specifically, he began to see his physical body as a limitation, and over the months he had grown obsessed with the idea of detaching from it.

Without it, however, the consciousness of his being-in-time body risked collapsing the wave function particles of his own thought-jizz into its own multiverse. The human meat-suit was protection for the cosmos, as much as it was for him, and “safe” sex was limited to the small piece of physical flesh of his enlarged cortex. His neural network.

Metaphysics, however, was Rick's risk-aware goal of dropping a particularly strong dose of acid. Tonight, he was determined to have nothing between himself and the cosmos, and he’d polished off the remainder of his Colt45 for good measure.

He’d gotten more fucked-up chasing lesser highs than the current autoerotic assimilation he had in mind, and despite the risk, each trip into cosmic-deep-fried-space had been entirely worth it. The mind-altering substances of Earth allowed his consciousness to slip back into the body of the cosmic ocean which had no shore.

The waves of particles—matter and antimatter—popped in and out of existence like the ebb and flow of winking stars. Rick felt his consciousness release from the hold of gravity and drift through the gravitational currents of the universe. He inhaled, sharing breath itself with the Cosmos and felt the atomized essence of the universe caress his thoughts in a gentle mist before swallowing them into the void with the rush of a crashing wave.

_**The Butterfly Nebula** Image Credit: [NASA](https://www.nasa.gov/), [ESA](https://www.esa.int/), [Hubble](https://hla.stsci.edu/)_

  
The sudden deluge of overwhelming sensation plunged Rick into the dark recesses of his thoughts, and suddenly unable to breathe in the yawning stretch of infinity, he fought against the current of the impersonal cosmic dark matter. His detached body grew sluggish, freezing to death as its warmth tried to reach equilibrium with the universe’s three-degree temperature. The sensation of pins and needles surged through his veins as blood cells ruptured from the lack of atmospheric pressure. The presence of the universe was lost or inconsistent with Rick’s senses, and the presence of himself was only further fracturing into the bottomless void he had made himself confront.

Unable to even close his eyes, Rick was suspended in the eternal embrace of the Cosmos, unable to escape back into his body, or beyond it. It was in this limbo that Rick understood: Consciousness was tantamount to existence, and its linear unraveling was inextricably woven into the fabric of his being.

His lifetime was one which could be measured in mere decades while the lifetime of a single star was a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, his life was like a mayfly. He was a fleeting ephemeral creature meant to live out the whole of his life over the course of a single cosmic day. The existential presence seemed entirely immovable to Rick, but from the point of view of the ancient Cosmos, the life of a human being was only a tiny glimmering moment, one of billions of equally brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron.

And even without his physical body, Rick's human existence, the tiniest, and most unnoteworthy speck of stardust in the universe was as equally bound by time as the cosmos. The void of space returned to Rick in the depths of his thoughts, reducing him to an insignificant nothingness in his own mind as he continued to uselessly struggle against the metaphysical shackles of his existence.

But against that darkness, he shared his gentle heartbeat with the Cosmos. Connected. Relevant. Pulsing together in time.

Rick Sanchez mattered just by being alive and existing within its embrace.

Sweaty and dizzy, he rolled onto his side.

The space-motion-sickness of a bad trip inducing him to vomit.

He was thankful his time had not stopped. 


	3. Pale Blue Dot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rick's first love was a planet. They were young, dumb, and orbiting the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags: First-Time, First-Love, Mommy kink?

Had the celestial rock suddenly stopped turning, the inertia force would throw Rick and everything else on Earth eight hundred miles, stopping his heart and killing him in an instant. 

But sure as the sun rose in the east and set in the west with the planet's rotation, Earth had always held onto Rick. 

The pale blue dot had offered the late teen something to find his feet on, and after a particularly bad trip, Earth's steadfast gravitational embrace could ground him like nothing else.

Now, he was scared to let go of that comfort. Earth's gravity was what had kept the young adult on Earth for far too long. 

Earlier in life, all Rick had wanted was to figure out his place on Earth, but by the time he made it into Earth’s orbit and felt the hold of gravity slip away from his body, he realized that he no longer wanted to find a place in it. Even in orbit at close to a thousand miles per hour, Rick realized that Earth had never been moving fast enough for him. 

Over the years, the sense of security the planet offered has shifted into a desperate unease as Rick began to feel bound to it in a way that he could no longer ignore. Before the decade was out, the US government had promised to put a man on the moon, and Rick was going to beat them to the punch.

Sure, eventually, the inhabitants of Earth would colonize the stars. But until then, the open emptiness of space could be his. Rick reached out to trace a liberated index finger across the body of the sky; charting a path through the cosmo’s constellations into freedom. The shape of his movements drew an arc across the atmospheric surface of the celestial body which he had come to know as home. 

It was here, on the Earth’s shore, that Rick learned most of what he knew, but now, Rick was ready to wade fully into the depths of the cosmos. He was growing desperate to explore the reaches of the Cosmos because it was in those moments—where Rick was entirely, intimately lost within its depths—that he paradoxically felt complete ownership over his self. 

That liberating sense of freedom was something only the existential depths of the Cosmos could offer him, and it was something that once gained, could never be taken from him. Not even by the cosmos.

The cost, however, was giving up the comfort of his pale blue dot. 

Despite his sexual awakening, Earth had always been his first love. 

_Earth had held him through the first moments in which he’d penetrated its ionosphere. The metal frame of his converted Westfalia shuddered against the building pressure of the celestial body's gravity, before climaxing over the atmospheric threshold. Earth held Rick as he slipped into the foreign freefall of exhilarating weightlessness, it rocked his body through the strange sensations that overwhelmed him as he floated in gentle orbit around Earth’s own._

_He moved together with Earth at five miles a second. Seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour until Rick, feeling dizzy and lightheaded with the loss of pressure, came into his pants like an untouched virgin._

_Rick’s excitement was short-lived, however, and was quickly replaced by the desire to break away from Earth's orbit entirely._

Rick stood on the same rocky terrain where he had first explored Earth’s surface as a child. Hiking out to the same ridge where he had first clumsily tried to prove himself a man with the girl he had a crush on, where he tripped on a tab of acid and let his body feel swallowed by the tall flowers and grass and trees. The same ridge where he had listened to the breath of the wind, moving through the trees and reminded himself to do the same. Below the same stars where he discovered his cosmic sexuality.

The same ridge where he was now saying goodbye. 

The moment felt too heavy for words.

  
  
Beside him, his faithful westie was outfitted with enough rocket fuel for a successful break up from Earth's orbit. Guilty, he shuffled his feet into the planet's surface. 

It was cruel, that while Rick was free to travel the Cosmos. Earth was also bound by it's own gravitational relationships with the celestial objects larger than it. Spaceship Earth was subject to the treatment of its own inhabitants.

"Look, uh, so don't—Don't let any assholes use you.” Rick stared at his feet with red cheeks as he spoke into the dirt. “Y’know. Suck your resources dry—and then move onto Mars like a fucking tool or whatever." 

The trees breathed with the current of Earth's motions, and the clouds rolled across the horizon in silence. A bird crossed Ricks line of sight, gliding on Earth's sigh. 

“I-It’s not the size of the ship—it’s the seismic shift of the terraform—whether or not they can handle the heat of your molten core, baby. If they don’t wanna give you those earth-quaking orgasms. Th-they’re not worth it.” 

Earth had raised him and loved him, and Rick didn’t know who would hold onto the planet when it started to get old. 

"—And if I gotta come back here to fix some hole in your ozone, cause some asshole couldn’t take care of you." Rick protested his own emotions, "I'm gonna be fuckin’ pissed!" 

Rick climbed into the driver's seat of his westie and returned his gaze upward into the familiar view of the cosmos that he'd fallen in love with. Some part of his being knew _this_ is where he had come from. He longed to return. He turned the ignition key, and launched his converted spaceship over the ridgeline and into the stars. Leaving a large patch of charred foliage beneath him. 

He pushed against the Earth’s atmosphere, feeling his body press against the back of the seat as the velocity increased. He felt the blood rush to his head as the pull of gravity lost its hold. Then finally, he was free. 

By the time he reached the moon, he dared to look back across the 238,900 miles to take in one last sight of the pale blue dot. The spherical celestial body, reflecting the light of the sun, wrapped in ocean and clouds. 

_[**Pale Blue Dot** Art Credit: Voyager One](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot) _

On it, everyone he knew, and loved, or had ever heard of. Every human being who ever was. On it, the aggregate of joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines. Every king and peasant. Every young couple in love. Every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of the human species was held by this planet. An innocuous speck of dust suspended in a cosmic sunbeam.

The picture evoked something incredibly human within him. Rick’s posturings, and his imagined self-importance. The delusion that he had some privileged position in the Universe, all challenged by the gentle presence of the Earth’s gentle pale light. 

He allowed himself the human moment of greif, but he wasn’t sure the tears were for Earth or for himself.   
  


No matter how far into the depths of the Cosmos Rick made it: Earth was home.


	4. Clusterfuck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rick’s cybernetic eyes allowed him to see the universe in color.

_**The Orion Nebula** Image Credit: [ESO](https://www.eso.org/), [VLT](http://www.eso.org/public/usa/teles-instr/paranal/), [HAWK-I](http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/paranal/instruments/hawki.html), [H. Drass](mailto:%20hdrass%20at%20aiuc%20dot%20puc%20dot%20cl) [et al.](http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.03600)_

Rick’s cybernetic eyes allowed him to see the universe in color. 

The endless expanse of the Cosmos was not like the pictures he had seen, full of color, and magic and wonder. The colors in NASA’s photographs were added in post by humans. "Colored in" using light to determine the elements, which determined the appropriate color; the secret code of the universe embedded in sunlight. 

The beautiful photos of exploding helix nebulae—the structures of which seemed to perfectly reflect the iris of the human eye and the deeper meaning of existence itself— were only ever an aperture through which humans viewed their own experience. It was one's own ego which personalized the impersonal nature of the cosmic entity. 

Humans were the sensory organ of the universe, so it wasn't a surprise for Rick to discover that the process of observation (which was able to recontextualize the very meaning of the cosmos through his own individual experience) was a particularly potent voyeurism kink. 

The arousing line of thought passed through Ricks's consciousness as his ship approached the close-knit cluster of stars. He wasn’t sure if it was Pismis 24-1 or NGC 6357, but he carefully glanced over his shoulder before turning back to the bubbly bombshells, flicking on his x-ray vision. 

The gaseous tendrils laced around the shapes of young stars like delicate cosmic lingerie. Accretion restrained them from shying away from Rick's gaze. He’d always had a thing for molecular bondage, and there was an inherent eroticism found balls-deep into deep space. He turned his head, picking up the wink of a pair of stars gently holding onto each other. 

“Twins, eh,” Rick bit down onto his drying lip, taking in the pair of stars like the space-creep in the gaseous bushes that he was. He lifted his hips just enough from the seat of his ship to tug his jeans down to his thighs. He reached behind his head to pull his band shirt off over his head, resisting the urge to throw it into the celestial firework display in front of him.

Feeling the chemistry, he turned up the volume of his cassette tape, imagining that the sounds of sex, drugs, and rock and roll could reach the cluster of space-roadies burning for him. 

He’d just gotten back from a trip to Mystic Mountain, a cosmic region of intense turbulence and high-energy stellar activity within the larger Carina Nebula. There, collapsing columns of gas were violently flung from accretion jets. It was the hallmark signature of stars enraptured in young and reckless love. The downside of getting into the action, however, was that the action itself was eating the columns away from within, all while being burned away by the other stars in its neighborhood. 

Although it had been way better than the horsehead nebula he’d found below Orion’s belt, the celestial gangbang had been a bit too intense. The festival of lights from this cluster of sister stars felt like a much easier ride, and from a safe distance, Rick treated himself to their dazzling display. 

Nothing wrong with some good-old-fashioned observational astronomy. 

_Art Credi: Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33), image: NASA_

His eyes momentarily flicked to the dashboard, checking the O2 levels of his ship. He considered adding some breathplay into the mix and felt his erection twitch at the thought. He reached out and cut the oxygen on a three-minute timer, eager to see if he could get off before squanching himself out. 

“Stella, baby, see what colors you’re wearing for me” Rick carefully breathed in the rapidly thinning oxygen, before speaking under his breath to the twin stars as he shifted his eyes to a sultry infrared vision. He groaned at the suddenly exposed cluster of celestial bodies and felt his dick harden at the thought of peeling away another layer of the star's clothing. His eyes rapidly scanned the cosmic orgy pulsing and surging beneath his gaze. 

"Goddamn," Rick took a gulp of air, feeling breathless. "Take it off for me." 

He reached between his legs, suddenly feeling frustrated with the clothing on his own body. He kicked at his pants in frustration, shucking off his jeans to let his knees fall open to the lights. He lined the sight of his dick between the two blushing stars, and stroked himself, lifting his hips in a way that allowed him the interstellar intercrural movement he desired. He played with his ball's letting the pair of fuzzy globes roll around the view, feeling himself grow lightheaded as he tilted his head backward in the seat of his ship. His oxygen was growing shorter by the second. 

"Yeah, baby. You're burning for me?" It was worth another groan, "Let me see." Rick switched the vision in his cybernetic lens once more. The lack of oxygen and light sensitivity making the stars glow with a fuzzy lens flare edge. Rick forcefully kept his eyes open, choking his cock with his fist as his throat began to constrict through the lack of air.

He huffed out a sweaty moan, feeling his lungs tighten as blood rushed to his head and dick. He kept his gaze on the pair of twins as his vision began to swim. The glowing lights flickered and swirled between his legs and the sight of them going down on him, fighting over his sensory organ that sent Rick over the edge. He lifted his hips—balls deep into the clusterfuck—and watched himself come on their naked celestial bodies. 

Finally, he let his eyes fall to a close, content to pass out as the oxygen levels returned to his ship. 

**Young Stars, Celestial Fireworks** Art Credit: [_Hubble NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team_](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/celestial-fireworks)


	5. Total Perspective Vortex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Space is the mother-fucking place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags: Bottom Rick, Space Dominatrix, Power Dynamics, Praise kink

_Art Credit:[Michael Miller](http://www.remarkableheavens.com/), [Jimmy Walker](http://jwalk.smugmug.com/): A star forming region [cataloged as NGC 2264](http://messier.seds.org/xtra/ngc/n2264.html)_

_Space is the mother-fucking place._

After 70 metaphorical trips around the Milky Way’s sun, Rick always wondered what it was exactly about the larger cosmos that even after all these years continued to draw him like a moth to an old flame. 

Still reluctantly wrapped in his flesh condom, Rick had clumsily felt out the boundaries of his own knowledge, only to be dumbly left humbled and incomprehensibly dominated by the Cosmic presence. At 70, he didn't want it any other way. 

He wove through the patterns of stars that had become familiar as the constellations in Earth's sky. Rick supposed he could keep edging space, but he knew he’d never truly _get there._ It was physically impossible (especially at this age). The Cosmos was still continuously expanding at a rate faster than his human ability to keep up with it.

Years ago, on Earth, imagining the unknowable size of the universe had been the imagination of childish curiosity and wonder. The kind that made him feel small and insignificant, but eager to prove himself. But now, Rick had experienced the terrifying reality, and the scale of the cosmos was no longer an unimaginable idea but a measurable horror that he had spent years traveling through. And the total perspective vortex had broken his ego in its entirety. 

He had traveled to beautiful planets and had witnessed first-hand gorgeous and spectacular cosmic scapes. Everything from stars, to planets to light-bending dark matter pockets. But for every beautiful glimmer of _something_ in the cosmos, there existed an empty _nothing_ which comparatively dwarfed its presence.

Space was _so much_ nothing. 

In the end, it was his sense of humanity that could contextualize his sense of proportion in relation to the cosmic entity, and it was accepting the fragility and insignificance of his own human nature, that allowed Rick to accept how powerless he truly was in the grand design of it all.

The math was simple. Rick was one small part of the cosmic formula, and he had been a living variable for a story that was never fully about him, and the more the universe expanded, the more isolated Rick became from everything else in the Cosmos. The more he was surrounded by nothing. By void. 

Not even the universe was free from the shackles of time, and theirs was running out, so instead of exploring the cosmos as it continued to grow away from him, Rick discovered the beauty of the cosmic entity by letting it explore him. 

He gazed through his windshield toward the ambient flickering lights which framed his ship like interstellar candlelight. There was _so much_ space between every star in the night sky, that the average human could be forgiven for believing that the glittering grains of cosmic sand had always just been ambient lighting that existed just for them. Just for this moment. 

In reality, each burning spec of cosmic stardust was a star with a mass greater than the one in Ricks own solar system.

But within _this_ moment, like the fleeting glimmer of Rick's life. _This_ life. It was so much more. 

That knowledge that nothing mattered, while accurate, had gotten Rick nowhere. Across the endless yawning stretch of the cosmos, planets were dying. Suns were exploding, and the universe was ever-expanding and cooling into it's inevitable heat death.

The wider Rick expanded his view of the cosmos, the more that unflinching truth about their shared existence had endured. 

But doubt and skepticism and fear had been the only mechanism through which he had been able to glimpse curiosity and wonder and beauty. The human emotions that ebbed and flowed with the changing tide of experience. Of life.

Once Rick had confronted the transcendental amount of _nothingness_ that existed, he had been able to once again, focus on _something_ in the night sky, with curiosity and wonder. 

Experiencing the rare emotional moments, Rick slowed his ship into an easy aimless coast to take in the beauty of the stars. Despite their cold cosmic indifference, they were so beautiful to Rick and always had been, and it was moments so full of _something_ like this, that Rick's beatific relationship with the cosmos came easy. 

He drifted through the current of the perpetual night sky, no longer fighting its movement. Content to simply exist with the boyish infatuation which had initially sent him chasing after the stars. 

Against the quiet nothing, the cosmic atmosphere was hazy: the darkness of the void, obscured by a shrouded a veil of illuminated iridescent stardust. The river of stars serenaded him, drawing Rick deeper into the current of wispy tendrils of gas and particulate.

Together in Time.

Rick placed a hand over his own heart, sharing the sensation of its quiet murmuring beat with the Cosmos. 

Cosmos described all there was, is, and ever would be.

His life: connected. His experiences: relevant. A fleeting moment to act as the sensory organ through which the universe experienced itself and through which he experienced the universe.

Every infinitely small moment held meaning, and against so much _nothing_ he found in the depths of the cosmos, everything had been a beautiful _something_ to experience.

Every moment where Rick Sanches was alive and conscious and existing within the Cosmic embrace mattered. 

_[Crab Nebula: Art Credit: Hubble Space Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope) _

He felt the cosmic current draw his ship into the orbit of the Medusa Nebula. The Sun-like star at the core of the nebula had died. And the yellow dwarf had left behind a wispy tangled explosion of gas and dust filaments that had refused to go quietly into the night.

Rick stared at the approaching storm of tentacle-like arms spiraling out of the black hole that remained in its center, bending light and space and time around the open wound of existence. Rick gained control of his galactic vehicle, pulling it out of the current passively reminding himself that at the end of its own life span, the Milky Way’s Sun would become an absent celestial object like this.

He parked his ship in front of the gaping hole and traced the glowing opalescent rim with his eyes. He reached down and flipped a few switches on his dash, feeling his ship shake in resistance. 

Rick was tired of nothing and for the first time in his life, he wanted to turn nothing into something.

His heart full and bursting with something, Rick wanted to get his rocks off filling one of the largest holes in the universe. 

“You think you can take all of this, baby?” 

Rick estimated that he’d need at least two-thirds of a galaxy to satisfy it, and so Rick popped the hood of his ship to the gaping hole in front of him. He shuddered at the sense of nothingness, full of wonders just beyond the event horizon, waiting to be exposed. Having found himself against the edge of his own knowledge, Rick was excited to see what would happen next. 

He smirked a shit eating grin to the stars, “I can tell you want it, baby.” 

He leaned back into the seat of his ship, already palming his growing erection. He pulled himself out, pressing the shape of his erection against the donut-shaped orifice, and he stroked himself a few times pressing a series of buttons on his dashboard. Again the ship shook with excitement, and the microverse battery opened, spilling the mass of a milky way into the black hole. 

Rick groaned feeling the gravitational pull of the ship as the celestial body took whatever Rick was giving it. The stars around them flickered, begging Rick to give it something more. 

“Fuck, you’re taking me so well," Rick rasped through heady breaths watching himself fill the tight hole, "Y-You want more? Don't worry, baby, big daddy Rick’s gonna fill you up.” 

Rick widened the stream of the milky way, feeling the ship lurch forward with the adjustment of girth. He pressed the foot of the brake pedal down, reverse thrusting against the pull of gravity as the celestial body continued to pull life into itself with the ability to reshape nature. 

Rick wanted to give it something. He wanted to give it everything. He gasped into the view of the night sky holding onto it as he fucked the universe as if it were the last thing he would ever do. 

And in a moment of metaphysical climax, the condom finally broke.

He came, with words of secret cosmic love whispered on his breathless lips, and continued to bring himself down with panting tugs at his softening erection. He watched his ejaculate slip into the mass of cosmic stardust, and into the shape of the black hole, not wanting the moment to end. 

_Image Credit: NGC 602_

But eventually, his microverse battery had nearly drained itself and Rick cut the current of his milky way off. Holding his breath, he looked toward the black hole, searching for something. 

The shape of it was significantly smaller. More stable. Rick pushed the limits of his ship, knowing he no longer had the battery to get the hell outta dodge if things took a turn for the worse. 

It was hard to make out something past the vantablack shape, but against the ambient white-noise candlelight backdrop of stars, Rick could see that the shape of _something_ had formed. The starstuff, and the black hole which had consumed it, had condensed into a dense humanoid shape, which was outlined by the thin gravitational lens of the bending the surrounding light. 

Rick stared into the celestial body, with an open mouth. He felt as if he were staring at the milky way galaxy through a cosmic magnifying glass. Staring at it felt like Rick was staring at a portal home. 

Rick was staring at his cosmic lovechild. A cosmic accident? Something partially human, mostly cosmic entity, but entirely of the same starstuff that had formed the nitrogen in Rick’s DNA, and the calcium in his teeth. The iron in his blood.

An experience. A moment. Rick had created something that mattered. 

**Author's Note:**

>  **COSMOS:** There are a lot of direct quotes from this television series embedded in the fic. I’m not gonna point them all out, but if you like the vibe of this fic, definitely check out the series (The Carl Sagan version is dated but fun and the NDT version has the newer science). 
> 
> **Pale Blue Dot:** This is probably the most popular of Carl Sagan’s quotes. It was pretty much verbatim in this fic. [But here is the source for you to check out. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RESsY2y8G2s)
> 
> [The Meaning of Rick and Morty: ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de2grEPn7rg)This is one of my favorite speeches from Rick and Morty Co-Creator Dan Harmon, and one that I think really applies to the themes of this fic and the idea of Rick being the sensory organ of the universe--the thing that gives the universe context and meaning through his individual experience. 
> 
> **Alan Watts:** “Someone High on LSD will see the beatific vision in the bottom of an ash tray” Alan Watts was a British writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularising Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience. [This quote from his famous speech on psychedelia and spiritualism.](https://www.organism.earth/library/document/being-far-out)
> 
>  **Total Perspective Vortex** : This is a nod to [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ](https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/t/114333)Coming full circle to the beatific vision witnessed in an ashtray, the total perspective vortex is a glimpse of the universe that is so complete that it can drive a man insane because to comprehend the universe is beyond man’s capability. The existential horror is that for humankind to survive in the Cosmos they can’t have a sense of proportion and understand [how big space really is. ](https://youtu.be/oca8BnDMin4)
> 
> **[Einstein Ring:](https://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/sfx_e/)** An important example of the gravitational lens effect is the Einstein ring phenomenon. Because light travels at a different speed through glass compared to air, it bends whenever it encounters glass, and thicker glass bends light for a longer period of time. Similarly, gravitational lensing acts like a circular lens bending the light of stars that are behind it. More massive objects exert a stronger force, causing a more pronounced bend in light. Astronomers search the sky to try to find locations where galaxies and stars and black holes are bent into such a curved/circular image. It’s also an experiment you can do at[ home using a wine glass](https://www.physicscentral.com/experiment/physicsathome/gravitational-lens.cfm).
> 
>  **Black Hole Morty:** Listen, I could not resist the idea of Rick fucking space so hard that he somehow ended up birthing a black hole grandson. [Black hole Morty is from pocket Mortys. ](https://pocketmortys.net/mortys/rock/110-black-hole-morty)“This Morty is full of wonders that are waiting just beyond his event horizon to be exposed from the darkness that hides them…” Spaceship it if you want.


End file.
